Making sense out of chaos.

Something Dark for Halloween

The wind blew Rita’s hair into her eyes and mouth as she stood facing gray hanging sky that blended with the asphalt parking lot below. Misguided dreams and hopes of infinite possibilities would end here on the roof, with her shoes firmly planted on the edge of the precipice. No more dress rehearsals. She had plenty of those. It was time to say goodbye. With her prized Gucci purse slung over her shoulder and a card stapled to the strap that said “Rita Minerva’s purse” prevented any doubts of ownership.

Harold would be upset, of course. More than upset. He would be apoplectic, but he would get over it just as got over his addiction to cigarettes. Maybe that’s all she was, an addiction. She smiled. How ironic that a bottle of Valiums lay inside her purse beside a beautifully penned note she wrote on a personal card left over from her wedding. She used the cards sparingly over the years in order to save them for special occasions.

She drew in a breath of frigid air, checked her watch and then the parking lot five stories below. The others would break for lunch soon. Again, she smiled. She loved irony. “Oh, well,” she said, closed her eyes, leaned forward, and allowed gravity to grab hold of her, dragging her down with the wind, and cold, and red tinted shadows that streamed against her inner eyelids until she met a formidable, unyielding force. A wallop of pain, like shards of shattered glass, splintered her skin and reverberated throughout her body, hurtling her into an endless drift of darkness.

Read this before, the first time you published it.
Absolutely terrific! Effective from start to finish, not a wrong note anywhere . Could be an episode of a show like Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Really, really good work, Lauren!